Political Economy of Local Level Budgeting in Bangladesh: A Critical Analysis

Abstract

Accompanying the estimation of revenue and expenditure, the local level budget manifests a grassroots area’s development plan for a defined period. In Bangladesh, the Union Parishad (UP), the lowest tier of local government, is obliged to prepare its annual budget by ensuring people’s participation through various mechanisms and committees following the Local Government (Union Parishad) Act 2009. With this background, the study explores the UP’s budgeting procedure to identify the influential actors and effectiveness of people’s participation from political economy perspectives. Following the qualitative case study approach, this study was conducted on the four Union Parishads in Sylhet, Sunamganj, Cumilla, and Narsingdi districts. It follows the in-depth interview and Key-informant interview techniques to collect primary data from the UP chairpersons, members, Upazila Nirbahi Officers (UNO), and other members of various UP committees. The finding shows that mechanisms like Ward Committee (WC), Ward Shava (WS), Standing Committee (SC), and Planning Committee (PC) for ensuring people’s participation have failed to work adequately. In most cases, these committees are confined to paper works. As a result, the budgeting procedure is dominated by the politically and economically empowered groups, e.g. UP Chairperson and his allies, ruling party members, local elites, and bureaucrats, which hinders the grass-root level socioeconomic development in Bangladesh.